Theatrical Bubble and Squeak

Abstract

“Theatrical Bubble and Squeak,” turns to the theatre of the mid Eighteenth century to consider the stage direction as both a leftover and the ingredients for a new theatrical dish. It takes as its example a prop, a dish of chocolate, used by the actor and playwright, Samuel Foote, to evade legal restrictions on the type of theatre that could be performed on an ‘illegitimate’ stage. By inviting his audience to ‘take a dish of chocolate’ with him, Foote recast his play at the Haymarket as a private tea party. The chocolate, I argue, is a prop that doubles as a cultural leftover: of an ingenious strategy devised to evade licensing laws; of the coffee-house audience that Foote sought to tempt away from the patent theatres; and of a theatrical environment that had legal reasons for not committing performance to paper. Yet being a leftover did not mean that the chocolate could not serve up a new theatrical dish, and this article shows how Foote's chocolate came to symbolise theatre that dispensed medicinal, subversive and sometimes toxic doses of personal satire.Foote may have performed his plays under the guise of diverting the audience's time (while the chocolate was being prepared), but his performances always finished before the chocolate arrived onstage. This essay suggests that there is a parallel between the imaginative activity prompted in Foote's audiences by the absent dish of chocolate, and the activity required to imagine the stage directions that we sense to be missing from Eighteenth-century playtexts. It is often the case, in Eighteenth-century scripts, that we encounter a blank space where we know stage business to have been performed. The dish of chocolate discussed in this essay enables us to think about stage directions, and about what was leftover and left out of Eighteenth-century playtexts.